From lawn to Foggy Food Forest: How this family is creating an edible landscape

From the Ground Up is a CBC series, in collaboration with the Food Producers Forum, that looks at how small-scale growers are digging and dreaming agricultural innovations in Newfoundland and Labrador. 

Picture yourself on a forest path: trees overhead, shrubs by your shoulders, and mushrooms, leafy plants and grass at your feet.

Then picture this: all the plants are edible, and they're all of your choosing.

This is the basic idea behind food forest gardening. And at their own Foggy Food Forest in St. Philip's, Jonas Roberts and his family have been busy cultivating their food forest "layers," including trees, shrubs, herbaceous perennials, roots, vines and ground covers.

Eventually, they hope to establish a self-sustaining, edible landscape.

"The food forest really piqued my interest because it mimics a lot of what works in nature," Roberts said. "It's kind of like the edge of a mature forest or a semi-mature forest, and every niche — every single space — is filled with plants."

Rather than spacing out crops row by row, Roberts clusters plants with different functions together. In the food forest world, these clusters are often called "guilds."

He'll plant an apple tree next to a sea buckthorn tree, with some gooseberry shrubs coming in alongside.

He might plant some peas, beans, or even arctic kiwi to climb up the trees as a vine. 

When it comes to "herbaceous perennials" — basically, leafy plants with a lifespan of two years or more — Roberts is a big fan of comfrey and oregano. 

The root layer, or plants growing beneath the soil's surface, can be filled with walking onions, garlic, or Jerusalem artichokes, Roberts said. 

And in some sections of his food forest, Roberts opts for strawberries as ground cover. Strawberries can even replace grass, Roberts said, "as long as you don't want to play on your lawn."

In some ways, food forests can seem counterintuitive. What about the shade cast by trees, for instance? But while Indigenous communities have planted dense tropical food forests around the world for hundreds — if not thousands — of years, food forests in cooler climates are typically less tree-laden. 

Along with occupying different ecological spaces, the plants in a food forest also play different beneficial roles, including attracting pollinators and acting as "nitrogen fixers'' for other plants. Roberts said nitrogen-fixing plants, such as sea buckthorns, autumn olives, peas, beans and alders, are especially crucial for cultivating self-sustaining food forests.

"Nitrogen fixers are really important. You know, the soil in Newfoundland isn't great. And rather than just adding and adding and adding compost and various other things, it's ideal to have plants that enrich the soil as they grow just as part of what they do," said Roberts.

Roberts explained that while many plants cannot access the nitrogen in the atmosphere, nitrogen fixers have a unique superpower: they can divert atmospheric nitrogen into the soil for surrounding plants. So growing bunches of peas, beans, and lupins, for instance, can gradually reduce the need for nitrogen-rich fertilizers.

Wood chips are another key element of the Foggy Food Forest. 

"Most plants have a very difficult time competing with grass. So we decided to get rid of a lot of the lawn. But rather than digging it up, we put down layers of cardboard and a foot or so of wood chips on top of it," Roberts said.

With time, he explained, the wood chips break down and begin resembling a mature forest floor.

"That really helps create a fungal-dominated soil, a really healthy fungal network, which is absolutely critically important," Roberts said. "People don't really realize how important fungus is to healthy plants."

'You can grow them in a pot'

A climate consultant by day, Roberts's motivation to grow food stemmed from his knowledge of how climate change is likely to affect the food chain.

"It's important to me … to develop my own resiliency plan for my family and make sure that we have at least some autonomy over the types of food that we grow," Roberts said.

The Foggy Food Forest is about five years old, and the fruit trees are still young, but Roberts is already harvesting a bounty of berries, rhubarb, edible daylilies, fiddleheads, asparagus and all sorts of other foods from the guilds in his forest.

And while there's plenty of room to grow in Roberts's backyard, he wants to make clear that food forests can be any size.

"You can grow them in a pot. It's just having different layers and different plants that get along and support each other," Roberts said.

"So you don't need a big yard. You can do it on your patio. You can do it in a small backyard downtown. You can do it in a small front yard and in a suburban neighbourhood. It doesn't really matter. Just figure out what you want to do with the space you have and then try and use what nature has taught us, to try and make things grow and support themselves."

From The Ground Up 

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